Johannes Wheeldon, Ph.D

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Washington State University

Dr. Johannes Wheeldon (LL.M, Ph.D) holds degrees from Dalhousie University, the University of Durham, and Simon Fraser University. He worked at AUCC between 2002-2005 and has since worked for the American Bar Association, George Mason University, and the Center for Justice Law and Development.

He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science and Criminology at Washington State University and teaches Philosophy to inmates at the Coyote Ridge Correctional Center. He can be reached at jwheeldon@gmail.com

In a remarkable reply to the detailed allegations against Margaret Wente for repeated plagiarism, the Globe and Mail has shown itself to be unequal to the tasks associated with running a national newspaper. In short, basic journalistic integrity at the Globe is dead. So what might be done?

Time for prisoners to start paying their own way, says the Minister for Public Safety, Vic Toews. This will invariably lead to the reduction of community corrections programs that have been shown to best promote successful rehabilitation and reintegration. What if instead of trying to break the cycle of poverty-to-prison-to-poverty, we actively embraced it?

I suggest this whole incident be seen as an important moment. It is clear many, many Canadians are scared about the ideologically driven Federal government under Harper: Mr. Harper: take note. Conservative values are not Canadian values and many people are increasingly enraged by your policies.

This did not look like a party on the brink of extinction. Young Liberals at the convention should be proud of their role and organizing ability. Their success should bolster efforts of many to educate young Canadians on the importance of our democracy and their voice within it.

No reform -- imposed from the top, or emerging from the bottom -- will be successful as long as academics in Canada continue to participate in the failed folly that is the existing research grant system. We need leadership from Canadian academics themselves, and scholars will need to be brave.

At its best, peer review ensures published findings in academic papers are based on scholarship that is meaningful, relevant, and credible. At its worst, peer review is slow, expensive, and nowhere near impartial. The problem is that peer review has been shown to re-institute orthodoxy as new discoveries.

The federal government of Canada is set to institute the broadest, most regressive, costly, and ineffective criminal justice policies in this country's history, and the harm the Harper government is set to inflict on Canadian citizens, taxpayers, and communities is nothing less than criminal.

Over time, hiring, promotion and tenure committees have favoured grant writers and grantsmanship over other perhaps more creative and innovative scholars who don't toe the line. There are serious consequences when, as in the current system, you invest in projects and not people.

I do not know the solution to small-mindedness as a part of conservative political strategies, but at least part of the answer requires progressives to ask some rather basic questions about what they believe and why. Here are a few starters.

If you favour superstition over science, ideology over evidence, and ego over empathy, you might be a small-minded Canadian. Are we witnessing the closing of the Canadian mind? What about the Alberta tar sands, G20 protests, and prison instead of prevention?

We do not live in an era in which facts, reason, and understanding are what drive decision-making. Unless liberals uncover what it is they believe and articulate it compellingly, another narrative will remain in ascension: that egoism is a political virtue, that compromise is for weaklings.

From sex-abuse scandals within churches to the stupefying fiascoes on Wall Street and in the Gulf of Mexico, a general malaise has replaced our optimism. For academics concerned by the crisis of credibility in our political, economic, and social institutions, it is time to take a good look in the mirror.